Hi, I’m the Game Industry, and I’m Addicted to Vaporware

I think it’s time for the game industry, and maybe some of its customers, to admit they have a vaporware problem.

After Nintendo made a series of big-name game announcements, from Super Mario to Zelda, for its new Wii U console earlier this week, I made what I felt was a fairly obvious point: In the absence of tangible products on store shelves, Nintendo had decided to instead start teasing games that might be two or three years or more away, and a lot of them. Many of these were not accompanied even by a single screenshot. To describe these substance-free announcements of games that for all anyone knows do not exist yet, I used the word “vaporware.”

I expected, perhaps, some quibbles over the exact definition of the term, which often happens when you’re throwing around jargon. What I didn’t expect was the remarkable emotional reaction to the piece, which went down the death spiral into curse words and name-calling faster than you can say “internet rage.” What I realized after this was that the traditional games industry makes such extensive use of vaporware that it’s gotten to the point that nobody can see it anymore. It’s like asking a fish what water is. And yes, this is a problem.

The term “vaporware” is almost as old as the personal computer software industry itself; it’s existed for nearly as long as there has been “ware” to sell. It first appeared in print in 1983, and a 1984 article in InfoWorld served as an explainer for the term and common examples of the phenomenon, which it described as “[computer software] products that fail to appear for months — and in some cases, never appear at all.” The creator of the term analogized the practice to “selling smoke.”

“But, if that’s your definition, isn’t almost everything at every E3 vaporware?” went the common rejoinder to that story. Yes, it is! That’s precisely it: the game industry, particularly the console and high-end PC industry, runs on vaporware. Software is announced, with great fanfare, far in advance of its official release date, gets delayed for vast expanses of time, and is canceled outright with startling frequency.

Vaporware is such a fact of life in the game industry that we don’t even call it what it is anymore. Instead, the term is typically only applied to games that spend an overly protracted amount of time in development hell. And as players get more and more inured to these long waits as the inescapable status quo of the game console biz, what constitutes a “protracted” development time gets longer and longer: John Romero’s Daikatana ranked #5 on Wired’s Vaporware Awards list in 1999 because — oh, the agony! — two whole years had passed since the game’s announcement. Today that would be speedy.

So as the definition of “vaporware” gets defined down throughout the years, game players get used to long, long waits and cancellations. Game publishers start becoming more and more emboldened, and E3 turns into a big game of who can out-smoke, out-mirror and out-bullshit everyone else. In most cases, I believe it’s done with nothing but good intentions — the developer has every intention of finishing and releasing the product. But the game business is so unpredictable that anything can happen, and often does.

Do I think that Nintendo will cancel the Super Mario, Mario Kart and Zelda games that it announced this week? No. Do I think they might be delayed for a long time? Yes, particularly Zelda. Do I think other games announced this week, like the sequel to Xenoblade, might end up in development hell or canceled? Yes. Nintendo kills projects that it has announced, quite often. Remember the Wii Vitality Sensor? Remember how Xenoblade almost didn’t make it to the U.S. after being announced for America?

Hyping up products that are years away is important to console makers like Nintendo, especially in the early life of a new product, because it needs consumers to see the console not as something they’re going to get their $350 worth out of right now, but as a long-term investment. This is as true for Sony and Microsoft as it is for Nintendo. They want you to buy a console on the promise of content later on down the road, so they can build their install base early, so that publishers will actually create that content.

And customers who buy in to that promise? As it turns out, they can have quite an emotional reaction when you suggest that perhaps they’re being snowed even a little.

Okay, so what, I hear you saying. If everyone’s happy, what does it matter? Game publishers deliver on the majority of those promises — even if they use vaporware as a marketing tactic, most of the games do eventually ship and a good number of those turn out awesome. Who cares if they’re getting people excited about something that doesn’t exist yet?

The potential problem here is that console makers as a group haven’t faced any serious competition yet. Up until now, there were always plenty of early adopters willing to buy in on a new console that didn’t have much software, for the promise of better days to come. But these days, there are gaming machines that justify their purchase price on day one. Nobody is buying an iPad because of the promise of a new app that will be released in three years. They’re buying it for what it does now, today.

As devices that aren’t typical game consoles become more and more a part of the overall gaming ecosystem, it’ll become harder and harder to convince consumers to pay up now for the promise of something in the future. What will become the more salient question is, what are you going to give me right now?

In that respect, Nintendo’s other announcement of the week — the Virtual Console downloadable classic games that are being released on Wii U beginning immediately — has the potential to impact the sales and health of Wii U in a bigger way than the announcement of a far-off Zelda game. It’s content you can buy and play immediately. That’s what potential purchasers of a gaming machine will want to hear about — not what a developer predicts it might be able to launch in three years’ time.